The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  A moment later the magus appeared in the doorway, closely followed by Sophos. “I’m glad to see you looking better,” he said.

  I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

  He smiled. “I’ve decided not to give you the satisfaction of gnashing my teeth.” I laughed, while he looked around the room for a chair to sit in.

  “That one is most comfortable.” I lifted my hand out from under the sheets to point.

  He sat down and put his feet up on a stack of books. We both remembered an earlier interview.

  “I’ll probably have to burn it,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve had days to get clean.”

  “Days?” I said. Sophos was still hovering. “Push the books off the window seat,” I told him, “and sit there. Has it really been days?”

  “It has.”

  “What have I missed?”

  “Not much,” said the magus. “An emissary from the queen of Attolia, a few from Sounis—well, four from Sounis.”

  “Four?”

  The magus shrugged one shoulder in an elegant gesture of boredom.

  “Tell me,” I said, “or I’ll get up and strangle you with one hand. What did the messages say?”

  “Oh, I believe that Attolia sends best wishes that the Queen’s Thief is well and hopes that she will have a chance to entertain him for a longer period sometime in the future.”

  I grimaced at the thought.

  “She knew who you were?”

  “She must have strongly suspected. We’d only met very briefly, but she knows my reputation better than you did.”

  “She’ll be plotting an elaborate revenge,” said the magus.

  “And you?”

  “Am I planning an elaborate revenge? No, I haven’t been able to think of anything adequate.”

  I laughed again. “I meant, did you suspect?”

  The magus sighed. “No, not at all, at least not until you were able to make a bridge suddenly appear across the Seperchia. Then I started to think it wasn’t an accident that I lost my way in the dark in the town. And I wondered if maybe the guards at the stone bridge recognized you. They seemed to have taken your appearance very much in stride. I wasn’t certain until the captain welcomed me to Eddis—as if you belonged there and had brought Sophos and me as guests. That other bridge, did you know it would be there?”

  “I go down every year after the floods have dropped and lodge a tree trunk there. My grandfather and I used to do it when he was alive. He liked to have a way to get into Attolia without being seen coming from Eddis.”

  “Pol knew,” said Sophos from the window.

  “Yes.” The magus agreed. “When we watched you fighting with Sophos’s sword, he whispered to me that you were Eddisian trained. I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me until later.”

  Pol had known before then, I was sure. He’d known from the moment I’d carelessly thanked him in my own words for the ossil berries. If he hadn’t been pressed by the Attolians, and if he hadn’t been so sure that the Gift had dropped in the stream, he wouldn’t have let me out of his reach without searching me first.

  The fact that he hadn’t told the magus what he knew made me think that he expected me to slip away once we were in the mountains and that he would have let me go. His orders were to keep Sophos safe and to bring back the Gift. Bringing back the Queen’s Thief of Eddis hadn’t been mentioned, I’m sure, and Pol must not have seen any reason to overreach his orders. I think he had liked me as much as I’d liked him.

  “Ambiades might have guessed,” I said. He and I had exchanged our information involuntarily beside the dystopia. I had realized that Ambiades was working for someone besides the magus, and he had realized that it would take one fraud to recognize another.

  The magus shook his head. “Ambiades was clever. It’s too bad he was a fool, too: always wanting more money, and more power…more respect. He would have made a fine magus if he could have stopped being the grandson of a duke.”

  For a moment we sat quietly thinking our own thoughts about ambition. I thought about Pol, who had seemed to be quite free of it, and I hoped he’d gotten some satisfaction pushing Ambiades over the edge of that cliff. All in all, I wished I could have done it myself.

  Finally the magus said, “To think that I once beat the Queen’s Thief with a horse crop.”

  I smiled and had to tell him that beating the Queen’s Thief wasn’t a rare honor.

  “Oh? Is everyone on the mountain as skilled as you are with a sword?”

  “Ah, but I don’t use a sword.” I explained that I hadn’t held a sword in the two years since I’d torn up my enrollment papers in the Eddisian Guard. During an argument with my father I’d sworn, in front of an embarrassing number of people, not to take a sword by the hilt unless my life was in danger.

  “Ah,” said the magus, as if many things had grown more clear. I wondered whom he’d been talking to.

  “You’re tired,” he said after a moment, and he was right. “We’ll go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You haven’t told me what Sounis said in his messages.”

  The magus shook his head. “You’ll have to ask your queen that,” he said. I followed his gaze to where the queen had been standing for I didn’t know how long.

  She was wearing a green shot silk dress that squeezed her under the arms and made her look like a peahen dressed up in her smaller husband’s clothes. My brother Temenus had broken her nose with a practice sword when they were eleven, and the resulting bump had given her a comfortably settled plainness that was more attractive than all Attolia’s beauty, but she didn’t know that and often felt that she let her people down by not being more pretty. In her five-year reign she’d won the loyalty and love of her subjects. They thought she was beautiful, I told her, and they would be just as happy to see her in a sack as in the elaborate costumes her dressers liked to bully her into.

  She twitched her lip at me to remind me that she felt she had a responsibility to be opulent if she couldn’t be beautiful. I frowned because my good advice had obviously been forgotten while I’d been away.

  The magus offered an apology for wandering away in the middle of their conversation, but she waved it aside, then sat on the bed beside me and squeezed my hand.

  “I think you need more rest,” she said.

  “First I need to know what the emissaries from Sounis said.”

  “Eugenides, you’re tired.”

  “I’ll get up,” I threatened, “and find someone else to tell me.”

  She gave in. I’d known she would. She wouldn’t have come in and sat down otherwise.

  “The first was just a stiff note to say that Sounis had removed his men from the forest on the southern slopes of Mount Irkes.”

  “He tried to sneak an army through the fir forest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aagh.” I rolled my head back in contempt. “The idiot. See what he does when his magus isn’t there to stop him? Did you set fire to the trees?”

  The queen shook her head. “No, it wasn’t necessary. I sent a note with your cousin Crodes telling him to get his men out by sunset or we’d burn the forest to the ground.”

  The magus’s face paled at the thought of his country’s entire army burnt to ash.

  “The second emissary was more polite,” the queen continued, settling back against my cushions. “The king of Sounis requested any information we had on the whereabouts and well-being of his magus and his heir.”

  “The magus’s heir?” I asked.

  “The king’s heir.”

  I looked at Sophos. “Your father the duke is also the king’s brother?”

  “You didn’t know?” he said.

  “I did not.”

  The queen laughed. “With one move,” she said, “you have secured my throne and brought me the heir of my enemy. The court is greatly impressed.” It would be the first time for most of them, I thought. “I believe,” she said, “I will extract a
few concessions from Sounis before I send his nephew home.”

  She smiled at Sophos, and he blushed as he smiled back. She had that effect on most people, not just Sophos. A smile from her made anyone’s blood warmer. There was good reason for the magus to want her as queen of his own country.

  “But now it is time to go,” the queen said, lifting herself off my cushions. She bent down to kiss my forehead as she freed her hand from mine, and I noticed Hamiathes’s Gift swinging from the gold torque around her neck. As she stood, it settled back against her skin, just below her collarbones.

  Two days later, long before I was ready to participate, there was an official ceremony to make my cousin Queen by Possession of Hamiathes’s Gift. Evidently just handing her the stone didn’t satisfy a lot of stuffy conventions. My father’s dresser came and helped me struggle into fancy clothes. I wandered through the ceremony in a haze and managed a perfunctory appearance at the banquet afterward. My cousins made their usual thinly veiled insults. My aunts looked down their noses at me, and my uncles casually insulted me by remarking how surprisingly like my father I was turning out to be, as opposed to my mother’s rather ne’er-do-well side of the family.

  I couldn’t seem to stir up any of my usual cutting comments in response. I was discreet, I suppose. Really, I didn’t care, and I see now that it amounts to the same thing. I went to bed.

  My fever climbed in the night, and my constant companions were the doctor and his assistants for the next week or so.

  I remember the queen coming to me one night to offer me Hamiathes’s Gift, but I told her I preferred to die. I’d had enough of Hamiathes’s Gift and its rumored powers to confer immortality. There is something horrible and frightening and, I’d discovered, very, very painful about being trapped in this life when it is time to move on. She nodded wordlessly to me, as if she already understood. It may have been a dream.

  When I finally felt better, I remained confined to my bed by the queen’s physician. I had attended the ceremony against his vehement opposition, and he was feeling vindicated and authoritarian. He warned me that if I set a foot on the floor, he’d cut it off. I said that I thought the followers of Asklepios took an oath to do harm to no one. He said he’d make an exception for me.

  Finally, negotiations had been settled between Sounis and Eddis, a new treaty had been drawn up, some compensation had been paid to the treasury of Eddis, and the magus and the king’s heir were going home. They worked their way past the physician in order to say good-bye.

  I sat myself up in bed as they came in.

  “Magus”—I greeted him with a nod. “Your Highness”—I nodded to Sophos as well. He blushed.

  “Was it because your mother was the Queen’s Thief that you were called Eugenides?”

  “Partly. It’s closer to the truth to say that Eugenides is a family name and I was named after my grandfather. But my mother, you know, was never the Queen’s Thief. She died before my grandfather did, and I inherited the title directly from him.”

  “But people called your mother Queen’s Thief,” said Sophos, puzzled. “At least, I’ve heard them say that.”

  I smiled. “She was a favorite at the court and was called Queen Thief, but not Queen’s Thief. They said she stole people’s hearts away. She certainly stole their jewels and wore them herself or sometimes dedicated them. She liked to take the things that people were most proud of. So if you flaunted your new emeralds, you were likely to see them next on Eugenides’s altar, and once dedicated they were irretrievable. People were careful not to offend her.” They’d learned not to offend me either.

  Sophos started to say, “Your mother, did she—” and then stopped when he realized what he was asking.

  “Fall out of a window when I was ten? Yes, but not out of the Baron Eructhes’s villa. She’d been dancing on the roof of the palace and slipped coming back in.”

  Sophos was quiet for a moment, looking for a safer subject. At last he blurted out, “When do you think you will get married?”

  “I suppose it depends on when I find someone to marry,” I said, puzzled.

  “Well, you know.” He floundered again.

  I looked at him, perplexed. He was blushing. I looked at the magus to see if he knew what Sophos was hinting at, but he didn’t. I finally had to ask, “Sophos, what do you mean?”

  “Won’t you marry the queen? Aren’t you a favorite of hers, and isn’t she queen because of you?”

  “She’s fond of me, Sophos, but that’s because most of the rest of her cousins are morons. I’m very fond of her for the same reason, but I don’t think I can make her queen and then insist she marry me as a return favor. The sovereign is not supposed to marry the thief. The possibility doesn’t often arise and”—I hesitated as I watched the magus—“there are always political advantages to be considered when a sovereign marries.” Eddis might still form an alliance with Sounis, although our queen would marry their king over my dead body.

  “Gen—” Sophos started to ask another question, but I interrupted him.

  “No,” I said, “not Gen. Eugenides from now on. I never, never want to hear Gen again in my life.”

  The magus laughed while I shook my head.

  “You haven’t spent any time in the king’s prison,” I said. “And you haven’t had to drink your way through every disreputable wineshop in the city of Sounis. I cannot tell you how sick I have been of cheap wine and of being dirty. Of talking with my mouth half closed and chewing with it open. Of having bugs in my hair and being surrounded by people who think Archimedes was the man at the circus last year who could balance four olives on his nose.”

  The magus looked around at the books piled in my study. “I remember that Archimedes. I think it was five olives,” he said with a straight face.

  “I don’t care if it was twelve,” I said.

  The magus rubbed his hand across the carefully bound copy of the second volume of Archimedes. It was on top of the stack beside him. “You should have a few more modern writers,” he said. “Eddis has been isolated too long. I’ll send a few volumes with the next diplomatic party.”

  I thanked him, both of us thinking of the threat of the Medes. “Who will Sounis marry now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the magus admitted.

  “You could always ask Attolia,” I suggested.

  He rolled his eyes and left, taking Sophos with him.

  I was left to myself then, to luxuriate in my cotton sheets and to recover my strength. I made the reluctant physician bring me the books from my library to check the dating on the pillars outside the maze’s entrance. They were unlike anything I could find recorded, and I came to believe that Hamiathes’s Gift had been hidden in the temple under the Aracthus by every generation for hundreds of generations before the invaders had arrived on our shores and had been removed by each successive generation only with the gods’ approval.

  If you want to keep something safe from thieves, hide it carefully and keep a close watch over it.

  My father visited often but briefly. On one visit he mentioned that Sophos had spent his days in the palace pointing out to one cousin after another that my tedious vow about handling a sword had been honorably retired. Several people did stop in to see me and to comment how much I had grown to look like my father, and not all of them seemed insincere. Maybe in the future my aunts and uncles would be willing to overlook the fact that I read too many books and can’t ride a horse, sing a song in tune, or carry on polite conversation—all accomplishments that are supposed to be more highly valued than swordplay but aren’t.

  When the queen came by, she told me that the resemblance to my father was all in the way we both hunch over and then deny that we are in pain. I tried to insist that my shoulder didn’t really bother me and it was time for me to be up. She laughed and went away.

  After another week, when I was finally out of bed and resting in a chair, she came to visit and stayed longer than a minute or two. The evening sun was slippi
ng around the shoulder of Hephestia’s mountain and filling the room with orange light.

  “Sophos went to see your family shrine to Eugenides,” she said. “He admired all the earrings you’ve dedicated, particularly the duchess Alenia’s cabochon emeralds.” Someone must have told him how angry the duchess had been when I’d stolen them, so to speak, from under her nose. I suspected it was the queen.

  I admitted that it was a little embarrassing to have him admire offerings to a god I hadn’t previously believed in.

  “I know,” she said. We both looked at the Gift, turning over and over in her hands.

  “Will you go on wearing it?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t stand it, I think,” she said.

  “Where will you put it if you take it off?” The temple was gone. It couldn’t be returned there.

  She was quiet for a long time. “I’m going to take it up to the sacred mountain and throw it into Hephestia’s fire.”

  “You’ll destroy it?” I was shocked.

  “Yes. I’ll take witnesses from here and from Sounis and Attolia as well, and when it is gone, Eddis’s throne will descend in the same way as the thrones of other countries.” She looked up at me. “Moira told me.”

  I nodded, remembering the messenger of the gods in her long white peplos.

  “It wasn’t meant to go on forever and ever,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t belong in this world.”

  “In a hundred years no one will believe it was real,” I said.

  “But you’ll still be famous.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. Lately fame had become a lot less important to me.

  “Yes, you will,” she said. “Because you’re going to write it all down, and it will be a book in your library. But first you will tell me everything,” she said. “The things the magus didn’t know.”

  It was a relief to explain everything to her, to tell her about the prison and about the temple and what I’d thought of the magus in the beginning and what I thought of him in the end. What it meant to be the focus of the gods’ attention, to be their instrument, used to change the shape of the world. And it was nice to brag a little, too.